Modern datacenters can take various forms. Some datacenters are permanent installations consisting of large floor plans having row after row of racks full of blade servers, some of which permanent installations are over a football field in length. Other datacenters are “truckable” datacenters that are built from equipment shipped in containers. In either case, a typical datacenter involves thousands of servers. For example, at a density of up to 128 blade servers per fully loaded rack, an average sized corporate conference room could hold about 3000 servers.
Today, datacenters include physical servers (also referred to herein as hosts) on which a multiplicity of virtual machines (VMs) are run to enable servers to provide desired information technology (IT) functionality. As is known, in such datacenters, a datacenter management system (DMS) is typically used to manage an executing environment in the datacenter so it can provide an appropriate level of service to an enterprise. As is also known, and among other things, datacenter management entails moving VMs from one physical host to another to balance loads, and to provide functionality such as (a) fault tolerance such as that provided by VMware vSphere™ 4 Fault Tolerance software distributed by VMware, Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif.; and (b) distributed resource scheduling such as that provided by VMware vSphere™ 4 Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) software distributed by VMware, Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif.
IT managers face substantial problems in managing datacenters. In particular, technicians often have a problem in locating themselves as well as specific hardware in a large datacenter. In addition, because even a smaller datacenter can be densely packed with equipment, locating specific hardware to perform audits, repairs and upgrades is problematic. Unfortunately, problems in locating specific hardware can lead to long delays. These problems may be further exacerbated when managing datacenter functionality involving datacenters in multiple geographic locations.
Current DMSs provide relatively low level hardware information about the health of hosts in a datacenter inventory. For example, a typical example of such a DMS shows fan status, motherboard temperature, CMOS battery condition, and various other useful sensor data. In fact, in some cases such a DMS may provide enough information for a technician to identify a host hardware health issue. However, such a DMS typically makes no mapping available between virtual inventory objects and their physical locations. As a result, such a DMS does not enable users to navigate and manage actual datacenter infrastructure in a hands-on fashion. To better understand the problem, assume that a technician had to fix a malfunctioning fan on a host. The technician would first need to locate a datacenter inventory manager to obtain the physical location of the host whose fan is malfunctioning. Then, the technician would need to ask a datacenter virtual infrastructure (VI) administrator to evacuate all VMs from the host (for example, by moving them to other hosts), and to put the host into a maintenance mode. Finally, the technician would search about the datacenter to locate the host by searching for the rack, chassis and slot in the chassis at which the host is located. Most often, one person alone cannot fix a problem like this in an end-to-end fashion today.
Another illustration of such problems may be seen from the following scenario. One common way to stage an operation in a datacenter is to have a “build room” nearby for assembly, testing, and other preparation before a server is taken into the datacenter. When a server malfunctions, a technician locates a replacement server, brings the replacement server to the build room, configures the replacement server hardware to match the hardware of the malfunctioning server, determines the version of virtualization software running on the malfunctioning machine, installs that version of virtualization software on the replacement server, and tests the replacement server for compatibility. When the technician is ready to switch out the malfunctioning server, the VI administrator logs into the DMS which runs, for example, VMware vSphere™ 4 software distributed by VMware, Inc. and has it: (a) evacuate the VMs from the malfunctioning server, (b) put the malfunctioning server into maintenance mode, and (c) power it down. The technician then goes into the datacenter, swaps the server hardware, powers up the replacement server, walks back to the build room, updates an external inventory management system, and finally alerts the VI administrator. The VI administrator logs back into the DMS, which, in turn, removes the malfunctioning server from the inventory, adds the replacement server to the inventory, and finishes configuring the replacement server.
Although laptop or desktop computers appear to be a good choice for use in managing datacenter infrastructure (for example, technicians could carry laptops in the datacenter), they are cumbersome at best, and require one to plug in external sensors such as a compass, a Global Positioning System (GPS), a camera, a barcode scanner, and other modern sensors. To overcome this problem, some have tried to use the same software products that are used on a laptop or a desktop computer on a mobile device. However, the form factor of a mobile device limits its usefulness since it is unrealistic to execute all the use cases covered by a desktop client on a mobile device.